the indictment, conspiracy to commit
fraud. The twenty-three other charges
were dismissed. He did so in part, he
says, because he believed that he might
get credit for time served. The criminal-
court judge, however, gave him the
maximum sentence-five years.
Armstrong was still stuck in the
M.C.C., for civil contempt. A U.S.
Court of Appeals rejected yet another
appeal, although a concurring opinion,
written by Sonia Sotomayor, noted that
"the district court's finding that Arm-
strong is motivated solely by greed is
not enough to justify disregard for due
process." Judge Owen was eventually
replaced and the contempt order aban-
doned. In April, 2007, Armstrong was
moved to a low-security federal prison
camp at Fort Dix, in southern New Jer-
sey, to begin serving his sentence. On
arriving, he was told by other inmates
that he looked like a ghost.
T he prison camp, situated on the
Fort Dix military base, is a white
windowless box that brings to mind
a giant shipping container. It isn't a
country club, but it ain't Alcatraz, either.
The prisoners can walk around outside.
Armstrong sleeps in a vast dormitory
hall that houses two hundred men in
bunk beds. Seniority affords him a lower
bunk. He works as a clerk, making about
eighty dollars a month. He spends sev-
eral hours a day in the library. He gets
visits from his mother and a grownup
son and daughter, who live nearby. (His
wife left him when their daughter was
six months old.) He even has a license to
drive a truck around the base.
I met with Armstrong at Fort Dix in
late September, in a tidy visiting room
decorated with a mural of a tropical
beach and a poster about swine flu.
Armstrong was squatter than 1'd ex-
pected, and bald, with a starchy paunch,
pocked skin, and a slight underbite. And
yet his eyes had an unnerving gleam that
contained something like mirth, as
though he'd surreptitiously shaken up a
can of Pepsi and handed it to me to
open. I bought him a cup of French Va-
nilla coffee out of the vending machine.
We sat down across from each other at
a red plastic table. A fly settled on the
shoulder of his prison greens.
His Jersey intonations were Philly-
tinged. "Prison is a microcosm of Adam
Smith," he said. "You get a division of
labor. There's a guy who knows how
to sew, a guy who makes the beds, a
guy who does the wash, a guy who's a
barber." The coinage is mackerel, or
macks; the inmates buy plastic pouches
of it from the commissary. The barber,
the bedmaker, the tailor: they usually
get paid in fish. Armstrong's line was
financial and legal advice, and he gave
it out free.
In a newsletter 1'd got from him in
the mail the day before, he'd written, "Pi
is not the actual source of cyclical activ-
ity. It is merely a proof that TIME is
subject to geometry." Did he think there
was Something Out There?
He sighed. "At its core, a cycle is the
mechanism by which energy is trans-
mitted," he explained. "Think of stand-
ing in the water at the beach, as a wave
washes in. You can feel the wave, but
the water isn't moving. The energy
passes through the water. Society is the
same way." Sometimes there's a rogue
wave-a big event, a major turn, a de-
pression. It was his belief that the rogues
were not random but, rather, entirely,
if theoretically, preordained, like the
concentric reverberations of a stone, or
millions of stones, hitting the surface of
a pond.
Fair enough. But what creates the
energy? What dictates the geometry?
"There are going to be people who be-
lieve and those who don't," Armstrong
said. "If it wasn't that way, you wouldn't
have a cycle."
He said that he was working on
a paper about Switzerland: the Habs-
burgs, William Tell, Hitler, secrecy,
gold. The upshot was that capital, like
water, goes where it encounters the least
resistance. "Given a certain set of cir-
cumstances, people do the same thing
over and over again," he said. "There
aren't many options." Soon a guard in-
dicated that our time was up-Arm-
strong was due back in the dorm for the
four-o' clock count.
The next day, Armstrong called
from Fort Dix to clarify his basic phi-
losophy: it was the big bang that cre-
ated the energy waves, setting in mo-
tion the cycles that govern the universe.
As for pi, he had a theory, which he'd
never shared with anyone, that its ubiq-
uity had something to do with dark
matter. .
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